Odd Hours

his chair and gradually repaired the politician demeanor that had begun to break down. He took an Almond Joy from his shirt pocket and began to unwrap it. “You like half?”
    “No.”
    “You don’t like Almond Joy?”
    “You were going to kill me.”
    “Not with poison candy.”
    “It’s the principle of the thing,” I said.
    “You don’t take sweets from men who threaten to kill you.”
    “That’s right.”
    “Well…more for me.” After he had enjoyed a bite of the Almond Joy, he said, “So there’s only option three. This is where I figured we would wind up. Which is why I had to trust you and tell you my situation. I can make you very rich.”
    “What happened to ‘Every man for himself’?”
    “Son, I like you, I do, and I see my best option is co-opting you, but I wouldn’t in a million years give you a piece of my cut. I’m surprised I offered you half of the candy bar.”
    “I appreciate your honesty.”
    “If I’m to trust you, then you’ve got to have good reason to trust me. So from now on, only truth between us.”
    Because he smiled at me so sincerely and because it would have been rude not to reciprocate, I returned his smile.
    In the spirit of frankness that the chief encouraged, I felt it necessary to say, “In all honesty, I don’t believe that Utgard Rolf is the kind of generous fellow who would share his cut with me.”
    “You’re right, of course. Utgard would kill his own mother for a thousand dollars. Or maybe it was five thousand.”
    He ate more candy, and I digested the proposition that he had made to me.
    After what seemed enough time for serious consideration, I said, “So, supposing I have a price—”
    “Everyone has a price.”
    “Who would meet mine?”
    “The men backing this operation have some of the deepest pockets on the planet. They have a contingency fund. At this late hour, with so much on the line, if you join us and share what your agency knows or suspects, tell us the reason you were sent here, and if you feed them false information, you can be a very rich man, too, living in a wonderful climate under a name no one will ever discover.”
    “How rich?”
    “I don’t know the size of the contingency fund. And I would have to speak with a representative of our financiers, but I suspect they would consider you so valuable to this enterprise that they would find twenty-five million for you.”
    “What about my partner? Annamaria?”
    “Do you have a thing for her?”
    “No. We just work together.”
    “Then you tell us where she is, we kill her tonight. We put the body through a meat grinder, dump the sludge at sea, gone forever.”
    “Let’s do it.”
    “That was quick.”
    “Well,” I said, “I don’t see an alternative, because I’m not giving her a piece of my cut.”
    “No reason you should.”
    “In the right part of the world,” I said, “twenty-five million is like a hundred million here.”
    “Live like a king,” the chief agreed, finishing his candy. “So, my new rich friend, what’s your name?”
    “Harry Lime,” I said.
    He held out his hand. I reached across the table and shook it.
    I was not thrown back into the dream. Evidently, it happened only on first contact with one of these conspirators.
    The chief said, “I’ve got to go talk to the money man, close the deal. I’ll be back in five minutes. One thing he’ll want to know.”
    “Whatever. We’re partners.”
    “How the hell did you do that?”
    “Do what?”
    “How did you pass the dream to Utgard and me? The dream, the vision, whatever you want to call it.”
    “I don’t know exactly how. You triggered it, I think. Because you’re the people going to make it come true.”
    Wide-eyed, a third Hoss Shackett sat before me now, neither the hard-case sadist nor the charming politician. This chief possessed a capacity for wonder that neither the baby-killer nor the baby-kisser shared.
    This chief might have had the ability to commit a selfless act or an uncalculated kindness, because wonder admits to the existence of mystery, and the recognition of mystery in the world allows the possibility of Truth. The other two wouldn’t let this chief surface often. I was surprised that they had not already drowned him forever.
    He said, “What are you, anyway? Some kind of psychic? I never believed in psychics, but what you put in my head, that was for damn sure real.”
    Recognizing that we live in a distressed culture where anything like a conspiracy